oss2009

The Doctoral Consortium and the conference provided a great experience for me to get to know a diversity of research topics conducted on open source. It's interesting to hear people present their work, and very informative to listen to the comments and suggestions from the faculties and the audience. I had an opportunity to share my very initial dissertation idea, and got some great feedback very useful for the conceptualization of the work. This kind of feedback, to be honest, can save a lot of my time "searching in the dark". I was also glad to know a lot of great people.

Stormy Peters: Open source software is changing the way work gets done

Tools make a big difference - particularly with respect to transparency and archival retention. OSS allows us to stop reinventing the wheel.

Of course the sessions are very interesting when people present such a diversity of topics but also talking to people during the breaks and dinner is very informative and a lot of fun. So as an extension of the DC, talking more about my research and hearing about others' work and how it may connect to mine is really fun. Because the context is the same, it is fairly easy to find some cross-over. I don't experience this with the HCI and CSCW research communities.

Stormy's Talk was mainly about how Open Source Software Changed Things. My notes below are taken quickly and are not edited.

-In the past there were completely different stacks, and now people from different industries work together. People from chip manufacturers, application developers, etc work together.
-OSS also changed the way we teach computer programming.
-The software in the past was free, and the more important thing was to sell hardware.
-Now instead of trying to write a script to solve your problems, you are googling to see if somebody else did this first.